From Kabbalah to Class Struggle

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle PDF Author: Mikhail Krutikov
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477725X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle PDF Author: Mikhail Krutikov
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477725X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.

The Scandal of Kabbalah

The Scandal of Kabbalah PDF Author: Yaacob Dweck
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691162158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a rang.

Der Nister's Soviet Years

Der Nister's Soviet Years PDF Author: Mikhail Krutikov
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041880
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A critical look at the later work of the Russian Jewish author in the Soviet Union and its significance to Russian and Jewish history. In Der Nister’s Soviet Years, author Mikhail Krutikov focuses on the second half of the dramatic writing career of Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister, pen name of Pinhas Kahanovich (1884–1950). Krutikov follows Der Nister’s painful but ultimately successful literary transformation from his symbolist roots to social realism under severe ideological pressure from Soviet critics and authorities. This volume reveals how profoundly Der Nister was affected by the destruction of Jewish life during WWII and his own personal misfortunes. While Der Nister was writing a history of his generation, he was arrested for anti-government activities and died tragically from a botched surgery in the Gulag. Krutikov illustrates why Der Nister’s work is so important to understandings of Soviet literature, the Russian Revolution, and the catastrophic demise of the Jewish community under Stalin. “Krutikov’s book on Der Nister will serve an important function, offering a strong, well-researched, and well-organized analysis of six significant periods in Der Nister’s writing. I expect it to inspire a great many new readers of Der Nister, inside and outside of academia.” —Amelia M. Glaser, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop “Among Soviet Yiddish writers, Der Nister occupies a unique place in literary history. Mikhail Krutikov’s meticulous analysis follows the transformation of the writer under the pressure of the Soviet ideological environment.” —Gennady Estraikh, author of Yiddish in the Cold War

Yiddish in Weimar Berlin

Yiddish in Weimar Berlin PDF Author: Gennady Estraikh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351193651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."

When Sonia Met Boris

When Sonia Met Boris PDF Author: Anna Shternshis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190223103
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Based on nearly 500 oral history interviews, When Sonia Met Boris is an innovative study of Jewish daily life in the Soviet Union, giving a long-suppressed voice to the Jewish men and women who survived the sustained violence and everyday hardship of Stalin's Russia. It reveals how postwar Soviet Jews came to view their Jewish identity as an obstacle-a shift in attitude with ramifications for contemporary Russian Jewish culture and the broader Jewish diaspora.

East European Jews in Switzerland

East European Jews in Switzerland PDF Author: Tamar Lewinsky
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110300710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.

Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde

Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde PDF Author: Mark H. Gelber
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110454955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This volume deals with the significance of the avant-garde(s) for modern Jewish culture and the impact of the Jewish tradition on the artistic production of the avant-garde, be they reinterpretations of literary, artistic, philosophical or theological texts/traditions, or novel theoretical openings linked to elements from Judaism or Jewish culture, thought, or history.

Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance

Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance PDF Author: Gennady Estraikh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666938017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine gives a broad view on Soviet Jewish literary life, and on the repression suffered by Yiddish writers under Stalinist rule. It moves from the paradigm of writing almost exclusively about the most prominent authors, whose execution in Moscow on August 12, 1952 is tragically known as "The Night of Murdered Poets." Instead, the narrative is built as a group biography of five writers whose literary home was in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1934 to 1991. Those authors are as follows: Avrom Abchuk (arrested and executed in 1937), Chaim Gildin (arrested in 1940; died in a camp in 1943), Itsik Kipnis (arrested in 1949; released in 1955), Rive Balyasne (arrested in 1952; released in 1955), and Hirsh Bloshteyn, an enthusiastic agent of the secret police. In addition, this book is populated by other Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian literati. Kyiv was the primary fountainhead for Yiddish literary creativity in the early postrevolutionary period for seven decades and remained a leading Soviet Yiddish literary center, second in importance only to Moscow. Attention is paid to the victims’ rehabilitation, posthumous or otherwise, in the mid-1950s and onwards.

The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust

The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust PDF Author: Nokhem Shtif
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783747471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Between 1918 and 1921 an estimated 100,000 Jewish people were killed, maimed or tortured in pogroms in Ukraine. Hundreds of Jewish communities were burned to the ground and hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless and destitute, including orphaned children. A number of groups were responsible for these brutal attacks, including the Volunteer Army, a faction of the Russian White Army. The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust is a vivid and horrifying account of the atrocities committed by the Volunteer Army, written by Nokhem Shtif, an eminent Yiddish linguist and social activist who joined the relief efforts on behalf of the pogrom survivors in Kiev. Shtif’s testimony, published in 1923, was born from his encounters there and from the weighty archive of documentation amassed by the relief workers. This was one of the earliest efforts to systematically record human rights atrocities on a mass scale. Originally written in Yiddish and here skillfully translated and introduced by Maurice Wolfthal, The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 brings to light a terrible and historically neglected series of persecutions that foreshadowed the Holocaust by twenty years. It is essential reading for academics and students in the fields of human rights, Jewish studies, Russian and Soviet studies, and Ukraine studies. Maurice Wolfthal has also written the award-winning translation of Bernard Weinstein’s The Jewish Unions in America, also published by Open Book Publishers.

On the Eve

On the Eve PDF Author: Bernard Wasserstein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439101698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent’s Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals. The Jewish crisis was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West. The greater part of Europe was being transformed into a giant concentration camp for Jews. Unlike most previous accounts, On the Eve focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews. Wasserstein refutes the common misconception that they were unaware of the gathering forces of their enemies. He demonstrates that there was a growing and widespread recognition among Jews that they stood on the edge of an abyss. On the Eve recaptures the agonizing sorrows and the effervescent cultural glories of this last phase in the history of the European Jews. It explores their hopes, anxieties, and ambitions, their family ties, social relations, and intellectual creativity—everything that made life meaningful and bearable for them. Wasserstein introduces a diverse array of characters: holy men and hucksters, beggars and bankers, politicians and poets, housewives and harlots, and, in an especially poignant chapter, children without a future. The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the “Jerusalem of the North”) to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea. Wasserstein’s aim is to “breathe life into dry bones.” Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, On the Eve offers a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour.